Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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What Defense Policy For Revolutionaries?, Young Spartacus May-June 1973
The decline of U.S. economic hegemony and the resultant economic chaos has meant intensified capitalist attacks on the labor and radical movements. Facing an increasing inability to provide the minimal democratic and economic rights of working people and oppressed minorities, the American capitalist class has pursued a dual offensive: governmental legislation to curb the power of the trade-union movement and tie it more closely to the state machinery, combined with persecution of the left to forestall any resurgence of even the reformist social-protest movement of the 1960's. Central to the ruling-class policy is to forestall the growth of any organized left oppositions in the labor movement. While the radical students, women's liberation-ists and black nationalists who typified 1960's radicalism lacked the social strength to seriously threaten capitalist rule, the current growth of the left in the labor movement poses a much greater potential threat. The gross violation of democratic rights in the Watergate affair indicates the Nixon regime's contempt for the formalities of bourgeois democracy, a contempt that will be violently amplified in dealing with an actual left threat. The strategy to defeat ruling-class attacks on the labor and radical movements must be based on an examination of the historic experience of the working-class movement.
The International Red Aid
In the early 1920's, the Communist International (CI) organized the Inter-nation Red Aid as a broad defense organization of working-class militants. While the CI rejected bourgeois-democratic illusions and idealizations, it recognized the need to defend the democratic gains of the bourgeois revolutions and proletarian struggle as an integral part of the class struggle. Lenin summarized the communist perspective toward democratic struggles:
"It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy."
—Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 133
The International Red Aid was also an application of the united-front policy of the CI under Lenin and Trotsky, which proposed joint action of workers' Organizations over specific and concrete tasks. The united front was designed to unite the working class against capitalist attacks and in doing so create an arena in which the Communist parties, retaining full freedom to criticize other participants, could counterpose their program to the social-democratic misleadership in order to "set the base against the top." The slogan of the united front was "March Separately, Strike Together."
The International Labor Defense (ILD), the American affiliate of the International Red Aid, led the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, C.E. Ruthenberg, imprisoned Wobblies and numerous strike efforts.
unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy."
—Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 133
The International Red Aid was also an application of the united-front policy of the CI under Lenin and Trotsky, which proposed joint action of workers' Organizations over specific and concrete tasks. The united front was designed to unite the working class against capitalist attacks and in doing so create an arena in which the Communist parties, retaining full freedom to criticize other participants, could counterpose their program to the social-democratic misleadership in order to "set the base against the top." The slogan of the united front was "March Separately, Strike Together."
The International Labor Defense (ILD), the American affiliate of the International Red Aid, led the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, C.E. Ruthenberg, imprisoned Wobblies and numerous strike efforts.
In a period of sharp class struggle, the ILD utilized all legal rights, seeking support from professional petty-bourgeois forces, while always emphasizing the importance of mass working-class action. It welcomed support from all quarters, but refused to politically compromise itself in order to gain support from non-proletarian elements. James P. Cannon, National Secretary of the ILD until his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, summarized this policy in writing on the Sacco and Vanzetti case:
"Our policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other questions.... The other policy is the policy of 'respectability,'... of ridiculous illusions about 'justice' from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle. It shrinks from the 'vulgar and noisy' demonstrations of the militant workers and throws the mud of slander on them. It tries to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an 'unfortunate' error which can be rectified by the 'right' people proceeding in the 'right' way. The objective of this policy is a whitewash of the courts of Massachusetts and clemency for Sacco and Vanzetti, in the form of a commutation to life imprisonment for a crime of which the world knows they are innocent." —"Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?" Labor Defender, January 1927
This was the consistent policy of the CI throughout its early years. The ILD never blurred the nature of the capitalist state or bourgeois justice; its policy was "class against class, “combatting
The Policy Of Social Fascism
In conjunction with the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the world-historic defeat of the Chinese proletariat in 1927 and the internal Soviet need for rapid agricultural collectivization, the CI's political line switched in 1928 to the policy of the "third period." The Stalinist CI claimed the social-democratic parties were more of a threat to the proletariat than ascending fascism, labeling them "social fascists" and rejecting joint defense against the fascist threat. This policy, which amounted to a refusal to challenge the social-demo¬cratic arch-betrayers' hegemony over the German working class, allowed Hitler to rise to power without a shot being fired. "Social fascism" became the guiding theory of the ILD, which rejected the defense of democratic rights and united fronts because this would "create illusions. “Breaking with the tradition of its earlier years, the ILD often ignored legal work, romanticizing the use of non-professional workers' self-defense in the courts. This foolish ultra-leftism allowed many courageous workers, unversed in court procedure and legal jargon, to be sent to jail, compliments of "Communist" advice.
During the Scottsboro defense, the ILD refused the support of the NAACP, another "social-fascist" outfit. Instead, the ILD posed the "united front from below"—unity of the CP, CP front groups and local unions somehow untainted by their "social-fascist" leaderships [see, for example, Scottsboro Boys National Bureau Letter, No. 1, 1932, p. 4j.
The "Social-Fascists " Become the Great Defenders of Democracy
Recoiling empirically from a policy which had resulted in the destruction of the German labor movement, the CI dumped "social fascism" but, in typical Stalinist fashion, embraced a symmetrically disastrous line having nothing in common with the Leninist policy of the united front. At the 7th World Congress, Georgi Dimitrov formulated the policy of the popular front—a. strategic alliance with the social democrats and the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie to defend bourgeois democracy against the fascist onslaught.
Marxists recognize that bourgeois democracy is simply one form of the dictatorship of capital, which is, however, forced to preserve some limited democratic rights which are vital to the self-organization of the proletariat. The working class thus has an interest in the defense of bourgeois-democratic rights against fascism and bonapartism, but not at the expense of tying itself politically to the bourgeoisie and subordinating its own organizations to bourgeois leadership. Thus, Marxists may call for limited blocs with the representatives of bourgeois democracy (e.g., the suppression of the Kornilov assault on the bourgeois Kerensky regime) but at all times seek the independent mobilization of the working class through its own organizations and under its own slogans. These tactical
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